Cedar Point trip

Every year, the Cleveland Clinic offers discounted or free tickets to some event or amusement park to all its employees. It used to be to Geauga Lake, which is about 20 minutes from us, but the amusement park half of that closed last year and only the water park remains. So this year they gave us a 2-week time frame in which to use half-price Cedar Point tickets with the option to buy Soak City tickets at nearly half price. We decided to make it a whole 2-day event and extended the invitation to relatives within a 3 hour radius. Only my cousin, Jackie, was able to take us up on the offer. In addition, Dan's brother, Ben, was still with us and came along. Turns out, a 4 to 2 ratio of adults to children is just about right for a large amusement park! We spent all of last Thursday at Cedar Point, spent the night in a lovely cabin that fit us perfectly (although Dan says any more people and we would have needed a 2nd bathroom), and spent most of Friday at Soak City.

Before we left, Greyson was talking up how he was going to go on all the biggest, fastest roller coasters. We thought it best to start him small and work his way up. Here he is on the Jr. Gemini with Uncle Ben (all the adults took turns riding the kiddie rides when needed, since none of us could stomach them more than once or twice!). The ride lasts maybe 30 seconds start to finish and is even tamer than Goofy's Barnstormer at Disneyworld. When he got off this, he said that was scary and he was done with all roller coasters.




So he stuck to the littler kids' rides for the rest of the day:





Reece didn't want to do the roller coasters but was thrilled to ride anything he could "drive". On the bigger rides, he wasn't allowed to sit in front of the steering wheel, but we managed to let him steer anyway:
I purposely didn't take my camera to the waterpark, but rest assured that we all had a great time there. Dan, Ben, and Jackie hit most of the big slides while I took the kids to the kiddie parts, and then we swapped off so everyone got to enjoy the parts they wanted. We even convinced Greyson to go on nearly all he big slides, and he is now a convert. We rented a cabana as home base, which worked out perfectly. They had table food service for the cabana area, and when we were getting ready to leave, we asked Reece what his favorite part of the two days had been. He said "When we ordered food at the table and they brought it to us!" Clearly, the boy was delerius from the sun.